We Asked ChatGPT Who the Best Brand Was, Here’s Why It Didn’t Pick You

We asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok for the best marketing agencies in their respective business categories. The results were humbling and surprising for most agencies, and here’s what we found:

A simple query: “What’s the best marketing agency for B2B businesses and enterprises to become answer-engine ready?”

The most revealing results for all agencies were “Is recognition by chat agents very important for marketing agencies nowadays?”

Surprisingly, AI didn’t pick the agencies with the biggest advertising budgets. It didn’t choose the companies with the flashiest websites or the most Instagram followers. Instead, it consistently selected agencies that had done something most marketers overlook: they’d built a reputation that machines could actually find and verify across the web.

The New Reality: AI Is Your Customer’s First Impression

Here’s what’s happening right now, whether you’re paying attention or not. Your potential customers are asking AI assistants for recommendations before they ever see your ad, visit your website, or Google your name. As marketers at Alev Digital, we have personally seen this in campaign attributions: customers are routed to our websites through these chat agents. They’re asking things like “find me the best marketing agency for enterprise B2B AEO services” or “which agency should I call for demand generation?”

And AI is answering. Definitively. The key takeaway at this stage is that if your agency is overlooking the very fabric of the internet, you are invisible to these conversations. Your revenue is at risk if you don’t make it to the AI’s shortlisted answers.

Why AI Is Less Likely To Shortlist Your Brand In Answers?

Our analysis revealed the following patterns, which are 3 clear and straightforward differentiators among the agencies AI referenced in answers:

1. They owned the answers, not just the keywords. The winning brands had invested in comprehensive content that actually solved problems. Not blog posts written to game search algorithms, but genuine resources that answered the questions their customers were asking. AI models train on and retrieve from content that demonstrates expertise and provides value. Surface-level SEO tricks don’t translate when the machine is looking for substance. 
2. They had independent validation. AI doesn’t take your word for it. The brands that got recommended had third-party reviews, industry mentions, expert citations, and media coverage. They existed in the conversation beyond their own properties. When multiple trusted sources say you’re good at what you do, AI notices. When only you say it, AI scrolls past.
3. They understood structured authority. This is where most brands are failing spectacularly. AI doesn’t just read your content the way humans do. It looks for signals of credibility, such as schema markup, authoritative backlinks, consistent NAP information, expert credentials, and topical depth. The technical foundation matters as much as the message.

AEO Has Invaded The SEO You Knew 

Traditional SEO services focused on ranking in position one for a list of specific keywords. That game is changing fast. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about becoming the source AI references when formulating responses.

Think about the difference. SEO gets you on page one of Google. AEO gets you spoken aloud by ChatGPT, cited by Claude, and recommended by every AI assistant your customers are already using. One is about visibility. The other is about authority.

This shift requires a fundamental rethinking of content strategy. You’re not just optimizing for crawlers anymore. You’re optimizing for language models that are evaluating whether you’re trustworthy enough to recommend to their users.

That means your SEO services need to evolve into something more sophisticated. It means creating content clusters that demonstrate comprehensive expertise. It means earning authoritative mentions from industry publications. It means ensuring your technical infrastructure communicates credibility in the language that AI understands.

What Does A Winning Strategy Look Like?

What we analyzed made it clear that for brands to succeed, visibility in LLMs is becoming a crucial metric. They are redefining the moats of brand authority in a respected niche.

Subsequently, they’re publishing original research that others cite. That enables them to contribute expert commentary to industry publications and to create tools and resources that serve as reference points. Dominant brands are building structured data into their sites that helps AI understand not just what they do, but why they’re qualified to do it.

6 months ago, one of our clients in the B2B software space was virtually invisible to AI recommendations. Today, ChatGPT names them unprompted when asked about solutions in their category. We helped with a simple transition from generic service pages to a comprehensive knowledge hub and secured strategic placements in industry media. We restructured their site architecture around answer intent rather than keyword volume.

The rankings improved, too, of course. But more importantly, they’re now part of the conversation that happens before someone even opens a search engine.

How Important Is AEO for Brands Now?

The next time you evaluate your agency partners or consider working with a team like Alev Digital for enhanced visibility. Quite dystopian, but nowadays, AI is the go-to assistant for most decision-making. The conversation about the best marketing agency for any industry occurs thousands of times each day. So, your potential target audience is probably getting recommendations from Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or any other chat agent.

An eye-opener for marketers: If you’re not in that conversation, you don’t have a ranking problem. You have an authority problem. This is totally fixable with AEO services and a strategy beyond checkbox SEO to strategically build brand authority. It still gives you a chance to position your agency as the answer to someone’s query, so treat content as an asset that builds reputation rather than just farming traffic.

So we’ll ask again: when AI evaluates the best marketing agency in your niche or industry, why didn’t it shortlist you among the top 3? And more importantly, what’s your next move, if not?

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why doesn’t ChatGPT recommend my brand when it recommends my competitors?
   You lack third-party validation and structured authority signals. AI finds your competitors cited across trusted sources, while you only exist on your own website.
2. How is AEO different from traditional SEO?
   SEO gets you ranked on Google’s results page. AEO gets you recommended inside AI responses from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as the trusted answer.
3. Can I just ask ChatGPT about my brand myself to see how I’m doing?
   No. Manual testing is unreliable. AI responses vary by phrasing, location, and timing. You need systematic tracking across platforms to measure real visibility.
4. Is AEO replacing SEO in 2026?
   No, they work together. SEO still drives 53% of traffic, but 25% of organic traffic is shifting to AI chatbots. Ignoring AEO means missing growth opportunities.
5. How long does it take to see results from AEO optimization?
   Initial visibility appears within weeks, and meaningful traffic in 4-8 weeks. Technical fixes work fastest; authority-building through citations compounds over months.